Date: Mon, 24 Nov 1997 10:57:26 -0500
From: Larry Rosenwald
Subject: Re: Re[2]: vernacular
Ellen Johnson writes,
"The negative motivation was my shock at hearing Labov say on the radio
that only poor, inner-city blacks *really* speak AAVE, that anyone who
has learned to code-switch can never go back to speaking the
vernacular in a way that is grammatically consistent. I shouldn't
have been shocked; it is the logical extension of his idea that
people who have been exposed to more dialects will mix them. It makes
sense on one level (and he does have the quantitative evidence), but
it bothers me on another. Like Orton's Survey of English Dialects
where only the most provincial "folk" speakers were interviewed for
the same reason: to obtain the "purest", uncontaminated nonstandard
varieties.
I guess my problem with this is twofold. 1) it shows that we are
still firmly entrenched in structuralism, looking for behavior that we
can write neat rules for and 2)it leads us to focus on speech that is
not really the common, everyday speech for most people in our society,
what I thought "vernacular" was supposed to mean. Or do I have too
much of a middle-class bias here?"
I find this very interesting. It reminds me of some arguably
analogous controversies in anthropology, i.e., over the desire of
Boasian anthropologists, in studying Native American tribes, to describe
the culture and language of those tribes as if they'd never been in contact
with European American society - an unlikely situation to be in,
towards the end of the 19th century and subsequently - and also to devalue
as corrupt, and to remove from consideration, the actual mixed and
multicultural state in which most members of most tribes found themselves
at the time.
Best, Larry Rosenwald